The company has been largely self-funding since it started with five people in Melbourne in 2005, but has now secured it's first institutional investment: $3.5 million from Starfish Ventures.

The investment will be used to add an anticipated new 50 employees to the 67 currently working for Nitro. Some of them will join a new dedicated cloud engineering team. Late last year, the company revealed plans for a cloud-based personal document manager codenamed 'Milo'.

The service, expected midyear, will combine features found in services such as Dropbox and YouSendIt with more conventional document management capabilities, and will likely be offered on a freemium basis.

"It's been our goal from the start to revolutionise the way people work by making document collaboration and sharing as intuitive as it should be. With more than 75 million collective downloads of our products to date, we've made a significant impact in everyday productivity, but we've only just begun to scratch the surface," said Nitro CEO Sam Chandler.

"Our first round of institutional financing enables us to hire aggressively and build genuinely transformative technology for the entire document lifecycle. We want to bring the 'future of work' here, now."